Back to the recipe page
Swiss cheese fondue is really good and lets your guests enjoy a fun evening, brings a smile to every face: fun food for good friends! Great for cold evenings.
What you'll need:
- Cheese, lots of it. Depending on your location and your possibilities, you might need to improvise. I'll list the general swiss recipe below.
- A nice pot
- A hot-pad or something to keep your pot warm enough to keep the cheese cooking
- Forks (fondue forks are pretty long to keep you from getting your fingers too hot, but you can use normal ones - just don't use plastic ones :-))
- Bread (it works best with harder bread - a baguette, etc. - anything "non-toasty" will usually do. Again, it depends on your possibilities. You'll need something you can cut into bite-size chunks, put on your fork and stirr in the fondue pot without loosing the bread every time. Experiment a bit or make your own bread, it's not that hard.)
- White wine
Ingredients
- 0.25 liter dry white wine
- 1 teaspoon lemon juice
- 150 gram cheese per person: I suggest Emmentaler, Roquefort, Appenzeller, etc. Diced into about 1cm square blocks or shredded
- 2 teaspoons starch
- 2 small glasses "kirsch" (gives it a kick, not required)
- Salt and pepper
- A touch of muscat
Directions
- Let it to cook slightly on your stove.
- Stirr, stirr, stirr.
- It will take some time for the cheese to all melt and make a creamy texture. If it's too clumpy, just add a bit more wine. If it's too fluidy, add some more starch (don't add it directly, add a bit of starch to a small amount of wine, stirr and then stirr that mixture into the pot, otherwise the starch will clump).
- Let it simmer and keep stirring.
- According to local practice, you should be using a wooden spoon to stirr, making figure-eights in your pot.
- Make sure to stiff the clumps on the bottom of the pot around, otherwise it might get burnt.
- This should take somewhere around 15-30 minutes, keep it warm until you serve it.
- Cut the bread into bite-size chunks, keeping in mind that you'll be putting them on a fork (about 2-4cm square).
Tips
- On the side:
- Fresh salad, tea, white wine, kirsch.
- Setup:
- Put the hot pad or little tea heater on the table, put the fondue pot on top of it. Set the hot plate to just barely let the fondue cook.
- Usage:
- Take a handful of bread and put it on your plate. That keeps you from having to grab more bread each time. Fork up a robust piece of bread, stirr in the fondue pot, twirl the fork to make sure no cheese is dropping, hold over your plate, let it cool a bit, place in mouth. ENJOY.
- Fun:
- One idea that is often practiced is to "punish" those who loose their bread in the fondue pot. The "punishment" can be something simple, like having to kiss the person on the right, all the way to having to buy the next round of wine / kirsh. Some extend that to include more original punishments, like having to go for a swim in a local, cold lake at night. It's your choice, otherwise, just laugh and enjoy the cheese! Make sure that you are stirring the pot - especially the bottom - with the forks/bread, otherwise the cheese might clump and get burnt on the bottom of the pot. The hard "clumped" cheese on the bottom is great!
- Afterwards:
- When the fondue pot is emptying, leave a small layer of cheese on the bottom and let it get hard. Yum yum! Hard core swiss will put an egg or two on top of that bottom layer in the end (stirr a bit), it's really good, but your body has to work extra-time on all that cholesterol :-).